It’s been such a strange week. I’ve felt sick with shock and unable to separate out all the individual horrors storming around in me – terror, jealousy, sorrow, grief, guilt, incredulity – but the clearest feeling now is of ‘wrongness’. Or shame, to give it its correct name. (I learnt that from Psychologies magazine. I learn a lot from that publication.)
For so much of my life I felt ‘wrong’. When I was a kid, Mum was in hospital a lot and our home life was rackety. Dad did his best but his headmaster job took most of his time. Maura tried to be a parent, but she was only a kid like the rest of us, so dinners were sparse, patchy affairs, laundry didn’t always get done, or we’d forget to take baths because there was no one to remind us.
Poor Mum suffered the most. Not only was she sick – and she was very sick: she spent a full two years in hospital with the tuberculosis, followed by chronic pulmonary disease, which frequently rehospitalized her – but her guilt was colossal. Every time she had to go back into hospital she cried and cried. There’s a picture in my head of her tears spilling on to my hands as she choked out, ‘I’m sorry, Amy, I’m sorry.’ I don’t know which of her readmissions I’m remembering – it could have been one of several.
Only when I became a mother myself did I understand her agony. Having to leave us all, knowing we wouldn’t get fed properly or simply have her support and affection – the guilt, the grief.
We kids handled her absence differently. Joe was the angriest – he often said, ‘I wish she’d die. Then Dad could get another mum for us.’
Maura, too, was angry and vocal about it, but the only time I was angry was when Mum produced Declyn. Why would anyone have another baby when they couldn’t care for the ones they already had?
I just wanted her to get better, and while she wasn’t in hospital for all of my childhood, the uncertainty was ever-present. Even when she was at home, we knew it wouldn’t last. There was one occasion she was discharged amid a great deal of ‘She’s been cured’ fanfare – but in just twenty-four hours she was gone again. In the last maybe fifteen years, she’s been much better, but we still treat her like she’s made of spun sugar. And the residue of shame still lingers. (‘I can’t play with you because my mum says you’ve got germs.’ And maybe I had – I was grimy, certainly. These days, I’m borderline OCD about personal hygiene.)
When I grew up and left home, that didn’t work out so well either – I found myself married, divorced and a single mother by the age of twenty-two. Other girls my age were getting drunk and buying shoes while I was working full-time and in sole charge of a child. Even though I’d felt physically and emotionally destroyed most of the time, I can see now that I was a little powerhouse, zipping around the place in Capri pants and snug polka-dot sweaters, baby Neeve under one arm, a vintage briefcase containing a pitch under the other. I could do my hair in a Victory roll in ten seconds and change a nappy in twenty. I was a steady-wristed expert at flicky eyeliner, a dab hand at d’you-wanna-make-something-of-it red lipstick and a super-speedy expresser of breast milk.
By the time I was twenty-seven, so much of my life had been lived feeling out-of-step that I’d accepted it was who I was. Then I met Hugh.
He was burly and handsome, beardy and broad-chested – but it wasn’t enough to make me jump into a thing. He persisted with steady, unspoken devotion and was gifted at gauging my needs. Like the night he’d arrived at my front door in London, bearing a giant chocolate muffin and a hot chocolate kit, right down to the mini-marshmallows. He’d even brought a shiny new oversized mug.
It was late, I was knackered, I’d had a hard day – he knew about it because we’d been working together – but I stood aside to let him in. However, he just handed over the goodies and left. Also impressive was that he’d brought nothing for Neeve – I was always a little creeped-out by those men who tried to win me over by being nice to my daughter.
Hugh saw me, the woman I was, not a woman who came as a job-lot with another human.
My eventual decision to commit was cautious and cool-headed but I’d never regretted it. Together we built up a life that’s been solid and good, and these days I’m part of a community: I feel accepted, I belong.
Okay, ideally I’d have the cash and body-shape to wear nothing but MaxMara, but from time to time I think, with pleasure, Even though it took me longer than most people, I got there in the end.
Only I didn’t, I hadn’t. I haven’t got anywhere. I’m still a misfit, a woman whose husband wants to do something unprecedented – he doesn’t want to leave and neither does he want to stay. Old sensations of shame are back in force.
Maybe Hugh might not actually go.
Several times during the week I’ve gone to him, white-faced with horror, and said, ‘Please don’t go.’
Each time he replied, ‘I’m sorry, babe, I have to.’
But he hasn’t told the girls and this gives me hope.
Nevertheless life has been a million miles from normal. I’ve felt as if I’m lugging rocks in my guts and my sleep has come and gone in peculiar little spurts, like receiving a weak radio signal. Also, and this is downright freakish, I’ve been instigating sex every morning and every evening. Not in a desperate demonstration that he doesn’t need to go halfway around the world – it’s been for me. If it was possible, I’d crawl right inside him and zip us both up.
I should really call Derry – there was no chance earlier to pull her aside for a private talk amid the mayhem in Mum and Pop’s and I’ve never waited so long to tell her something this huge.
The impediment – and it takes a while before I’ve burrowed deep enough to identify it – is that the news will hurt her. My pain becomes her pain, and it cuts both ways.
But we approach life differently. She’s proactive, impatient, and if something breaks on her, she replaces it immediately. Nothing ever gets mended and nothing is given time to heal. Her response will be to try to find a new man for me. She belongs to some awful dating agency for rich people and before I know it she’ll have bundled me off to an elite club, where I’ll have to drink Krug and discuss tax avoidance. No. Extreme no.
Because it’s borderline illegal to phone a person ‘just for a chat’, I consider texting Posh Petra to see if I can ring. But there’s no point. Three years ago, at the age of forty-two, she had twin girls, who suffer from what she calls ‘Satan Syndrome’. (A condition unique to them.)
They put Joe’s three sons to shame: they appear not to sleep. If they’re not breaking an object, they’re smearing it with something disgusting, and the noise they create – yelling, banging, howling – would fray the hardiest of nerves. Poor Posh Petra …
It’s hard to know what percentage posh she actually is. Her accent is refined but not bad enough to generate instant dislike; her childhood family holidays were mostly spent in foreign art galleries, but instead of being bored witless like any normal person, she still goes into raptures about Dutch masters. Also, she calls dinner ‘supper’.
We’d met more than a decade ago while supervising an outing of five-year-olds – Petra’s daughter Anne was in Kiara’s class. Petra had surveyed the mass of squealing pinkness, and muttered, ‘What fresh hell is this?’
For me, it was like falling in love.
Of all my friends, Petra would most get how I’m feeling about Hugh. But a phone call is impossible because she has to break off every five seconds to shriek at the twins, and visiting her at home is worse because I usually leave with a plateful of baked beans in my hair. Seeing her in the outside world is also difficult because babysitters come once, then leave weeping, swearing never to return – usually with baked beans mashed into their teenage hair. The baked-beans treatment is the girls’ thing.
Petra’s husband and she cope by divvying up small amounts of time when each goes out alone. Sunday evening is Petra’s slot. I’ll have to wait until then.